Dallas - the worst tourist destination in America

You know what? Don't come to Dallas. It isn't fun to visit.

Today Ronn and I tried to make it fun and interesting. We tried, but Dallas got in the way.

First thing was a trip to the Ft. Worth Science and Planetarium. I haven't been to a planetarium since I was a little kid, and I was really looking forward to it. We checked the website to make sure everything was cool. They had an update that said because of the Texas Stock Show (a cow show), parking might be limited. Okay, no problem. We head down there using Ronn's GPS. It says we are where we are supposed to be, but nothing that looks like a science center or planetarium. Ask the man at the visitor center - and he says most of it has been closed down for reconstruction, and that we should come back in May of 2009. Why on earth would you put updates about daily parking conditions on your website, but not "Oh, hey, we're closed for the next year and a half?" · Same as the Reunion Tower! Stupid!

So we head all the way to Dallas to check out their planetarium. We finally make it there, and then are turned away because it is only open to the public on the weekends. They tell us this right after a lady walks out with three or four kids. Unbelievable. The guy who told us this was a chump too. He said "sorry" in one of those tones that really says "I could give a s*** about you, hahahahahaha".

We try our luck at the Dallas Science Place around the corner. They supposedly have some cool IMAX films there, so we figure we might still salvage all this driving we are doing. Nope. The films are only shown until 2:45 Mon-Thurs. The time we show up after driving all over the greater Dallas area and being told to go away? Two fifty-five.

Our last ditch effort so we can actually say we did something without lying about it was the Space and Flight Museum. And whaddya know? Something that is open! We spent about an hour walking around and checking out the planes they had on exhibit. It was actually pretty cool. They had the nose section from a Southwest Airlines plane that you could walk up into and check out, flight simulators for an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane and F-4 Phantom fighter, and they had Apollo 7's landing pod. You know, the one that would get shot up into space on a rocket, orbit the earth, and then parachute into the ocean with the astronauts on board? This pod had traveled 4.5 million miles in space. There are a few other things that we saw there, you can see them in the photos.

After that, we drove back to the house. I will never come to Dallas again for entertainment purposes.

Later tonight we are going to drive by BestBuy to pick up some stuff. I am pretty sure they will be open.

Then again, this is Dallas area. They might not be.

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